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The basement was cold and ratty; they’d had plans to refurbish it before…well, everything . Etho had dubbed it the “Man-Cave” and had even started drawing up blueprints which now sat on his desk, untouched. One of the pipes was leaking, but neither he nor Cleo was willing to venture deep enough into the basement to fix it. At the bottom of the steel stairs was a concrete floor that stretched off into the darkness, and a ceiling laced with concrete beams that looked in desperate need of maintenance that would never come.
Just to be safe, they’d cut off every electronic in the basement. The lights had been savagely eviscerated, and he had to light a candle in order to see.
Etho wasn’t hard to find; he hadn’t left his spot in the far corner, as far from the stairs as he could get. He was hunched over in the corner; they’d left his tools down there for him to distract himself, but they’d all been flung as far out of his reach as he could manage. Two sets of chained-together iron manacles were clasped around his wrists and ankles and bolted into the floor. A circle drawn in white chalk marked the boundaries of his reach.
“Etho?” Bdubs called.
Etho looked up, and even after all this time Bdubs couldn't stop himself from shuddering. His left eye glowed an eerie, robotic red, and it fixed and darted around more like a camera than a flesh-and-blood organ. A blue mark stretched under it, tattooed against the skin. Jutting from his left temple was a jagged metal horn.
Etho tilted his head curiously, almost animalistically. Bdubs couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief; his movements weren’t jerky or robotic yet. A faint smile crossed his face at the sight of Bdubs.
“Hey, Bdubs. It’s been a while,” he noted. There was a jagged, metallic rasp to his voice, like his vocal cords were turning to steel. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me.”
Bdubs snorted. “Kinda hard not to when your screaming keeps wakin’ me up at night.”
Etho flinched and drew his tails around himself. Three had already been completely consumed by metal and four more were partially-consumed; only two remained intact, and those two flicked with nerves.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
Guilt panged in Bdubs’s chest. “Don’t be. That was a little too harsh.”
“It’s true, though.”
Bdubs opened his mouth to contradict Etho, but he was never as good of a liar; he snapped it shut again and huffed, nudging a scattered hammer with the toe of his boot.
“Is Grian awake yet?” Etho asked.
Bdubs shook his head. “Not yet. We’re pretty sure he’s gone for good, but we got you back, didn’t we?”
“You didn’t get me back. You just bought me time.”
“...yeah. Yeah, I know.”
The duo fell into silence. Bdubs sat down cross-legged, just at the edge of the chalk circle.
“How much longer do you think you’ve still got?” he asked.
Etho shrugged. “A few more months, at least.”
Bdubs bit his tongue. That wasn’t enough time, not nearly enough time.
“We’ll think of something,” he said. “We always do. Xisuma-”
“I think the only thing Xisuma can do to save me now is kill me.”
Bdubs fell dead silent. The bitter taste of iron coated his tongue.
“ Don’t, ” he hissed. “ Do not say that. You know that’s not true.”
Etho closed his eyes and leaned his head back with a sigh. “No one’s ever cured a Rüstov infection, Bubs.”
“No one’s ever held out this long against one, either,” Bdubs pointed out.
“The only reason I’m still alive is because I’ve been using my powers on it, but it’s alive too. I can…” he hesitated. His remaining flesh ear tipped back, pinning against the side of his skull. “I can hear it talking to me sometimes, and it gets stronger every time. It’s only a matter of time before I can’t hold out against it anymore.”
“Well, can’t we just - I dunno - use one of those fancy things that blows out electricity on it?”
“That’d kill me too,” Etho said. “I mean, look at me.”
He gestured at himself as much as the chains would allow. His left arm was consumed from the elbow to the fingertips, and his right ear was nothing but a curved sheet of steel mesh. His clothes hid the worst of it: the mess of hydraulics and tubing that had replaced his lower torso. He’d stopped eating a few months ago; there was no point feeding someone who didn’t even have a stomach anymore.
“There has to be something - don’t say killing you - that we can do to stop it,” Bdubs said. He dragged his fingers through his hair, tightly-wound as a spring. “Xisuma said he could try to destroy the worst of it with Void, and Doc- Zed-”
“Bdubs.”
“Or we could try and hack into Smart’s infrastructure and see if Smart Corp has anything - if anyone does, it’d be that d-bag-”
“ Bdubs. ”
“ What?! ”
“I appreciate it, but there’s nothing you can do.”
“How would you know?!” Bdubs snapped. “Why are you so resigned to this? I’ve never seen you like this before! Hell, it was your idea to save Grian’s ass when the Rüstov took him !”
“Because I’ve known this was how I was going to die since I was a kid.”
The silence that followed was strong enough to deflect a bullet.
“Etho, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Etho hummed and closed his eyes. His robotic eye glowed eerily under his skin.
“It was how my parents died,” he said softly. “They transformed right in front of me. There was nothing I could do. They tore the rest of my litter apart and would’ve gone after me too if someone hadn’t noticed and stopped them.”
He clenched his flesh hand.
“When I found out they took Grian, I hoped there was some way we could save him; they don’t like to kill their prisoners, they’d rather use our bodies instead. And I was right, but getting rid of the infection didn’t bring him back. We saved his corpse , Bdubs, not him. He’s gone, and now I’m next.”
He opened his eyes again and fixed them on Bdubs. The whirr of the camera lens sent an unnerved shiver down Bdubs’s spine. Etho smiled softly, gently, revealing one of his fangs in the process; it had been turned to metal. The light in his flesh eye was gone, and with it his hope for survival.
“I’d rather die as myself than leave just an empty shell for you to look after, and either’s better than living as a monster.”
“You’re not going to die. You’re not going to do any of those things. We’re going to save your ass, you stupid-”
“Bdubs?” Cleo called from the basement stairs.
Bdubs nearly jumped out of his skin. Etho chuckled at the sight, and Bdubs glared at him in response. For a moment, things seemed normal again.
“Don’t scare me like that!” Bdubs hissed.
Cleo was unfazed.
“Xisuma’s here. He says he’s got an idea.”
Bdubs shot Etho a look, as if to say See? We’ve still got a chance!
“I’ll be right back,” Bdubs said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Etho raised a chained wrist and an eyebrow, and Bdubs huffed. If he didn’t stand a chance of becoming infected himself, he’d have elbowed him.
“Don’t play smart with me.”
Etho grinned. It faded as soon as Bdubs’s back was turned, and was gone completely by the time he was up the stairs.
If they won’t do it, he decided, then I will.